Mother

Gilli Smyth co-founded Gong with her partner Daevid Allen in 1967, and provided poems and as herself or Shakti Yoni provided “space whispers” to their psychedelic freakouts throughout their initial imperial phase, as well as to spin-offs like Mother Gong and Planet Gong. Her first solo album – with Allen on all instrumental and production duties – starts off in classic space-rock mode, but quickly takes an extremely sharp left turn into gloriously molten ambient, with Smyth’s mangled fairytales and nursery rhymes murmured, whispered, sung and whooped through a soup of abstract sound, folk melody and cut-up voices. It’s as much radio art as music, evoking The Goon Show and The Firesign Theatre, but when it does pick up as on the Faust-like “Shakti Yoni” it grooves like… well, like a mother. The album stands up as one of the weirdest things in the entire Gong cinematic universe, which is saying something indeed, and if by the final nine-and-a-half-minute folk tale “Taleisin” your mind is still fully intact, you haven’t been listening closely.